Safer to Stay Home
by An Author's Pen
Summary: Bilbo never goes on an adventure. - AU.


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"Your presence honors us, fair folk," Frodo manages, as besides him Sam stares up at the elves, mouth open, too awed to remember his manners.

"A fair spoken hobbit," says one elf. In tales elves are ever merry, but Frodo has never before seen a brow so bent with care. All the elves are clad in grave silver. Some wear long veils, which flutter in the glad Summer's breeze, long veils like hobbits don for weddings, or for funerals. "Such fair lands." The elf sighs, as his eyes flit from green hillock to green meadow. "And a fair, gentle people. Truly, the Valar are cruel."

Frodo opens his mouth again, but stammers now, and knows not what to say.

"The blessings of the elves upon your home," speaks another. "However long such a blessing holds."

Just as a waning crescent moon shines unexpectedly, once, upon the gazer, then again is swallowed up by clouds, the elves are there, and then they are gone.

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Frodo meets a family of Bree hobbits building houses. The neat buildings rise up from the ground, and Frodo reminds himself that not all hobbits can have a smial as nice as Bag End. "It's not safe anymore out there," they say. "What changed, we don't know. One day the rangers vanished, and at first we thought, well, good riddance! But soon the howling began. Then the things came out from the woods."

"Things?" says Frodo. "What things?"

The hobbits shudder, tell him to keep his mind to his own business thank-ye-very-much, and say no more.

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The harvest is poor that year. The fruit is sick: small, hard apples; mushy peaches; blackberries that grow long thorns and never sweeten.

"A bad year," Sam says. "It 'appens, Mr. Frodo."

But the Spring-born babies cry all through the night, and the midwives cannot calm them, though they try.

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Bilbo has told this tale often enough to him, of thirteen dwarves he was forced to entertain, who ate and ate, oh: raspberry jam and apple tart, mince pie, pork pie, cheese and salad, eggs and coffee, and seed cake, my _seed cake_, Frodo! How they nearly broke all the dishes!

But only late in the night when the smell of wax is strong does he murmur, "The wrong hobbit, I told them. Didn't need any adventure."

"If you had went," Frodo begins.

"Toast," Bilbo says. He lets out a jolly ha-ha, slapping a wrinkled hand against his knee. "Toasted hobbit, that's what I'd be."

"Do you think they're dead now?"

When Frodo was young, Bilbo would say, "Oh, they were mighty warriors, Frodo-lad. Probably feasting or some such in the halls of Erebor right now."

At the age of 33, Frodo asks again. He watches Bilbo puff on his pipe for a long while. "I don't know," Bilbo says, finally. "I don't know."

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The next year the harvest is worse. Pantries go bare. Wolves howl outside the Buckland gate.

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Bilbo dies a few months after his 107th birthday, frail and perhaps more prone to grumbling than in his younger years, but a good, dear hobbit, all agree, even the Sackville-Bagginses, who come to the funeral and look appropriately contrite. Frodo says something dignified and fitting – it hardly matters – and rushes off as soon as he can into the trees, following the little burbling creeks and listening to birdsong until the sun sets and the birds quiet. He remembers how he used to run about, dreaming of wild places and open roads. "So did I, Frodo-lad. But I grew up."

Sam finds him, of course, and doesn't say a word but takes him home.

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A strange man in strange metal armor stumbles into the Shire, fevered and wounded gravely. He only lives a day. "The black shadow," he whispers to the hobbits who lay him on some hay and try to make him drink. "Gondor falls."

They bury him, as is proper, and try not to think on it overmuch.

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Frodo is twenty four and running, mushrooms clutched in his hands and the dogs too close behind him. His heart pumps like the footsteps of a giant, booming, about to pick him up and squeeze out all the air left in his lungs.

Later, he will joke with his friends about Farmer Maggot's dogs. But later he will be home, and safe, and _safe._ Later still, he wonders if adventure is that: terror behind you, except you can't go home.

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There was a tall man with tall hat, dressed like a beggar. Frodo had seen him before, always from a distance but for once. Walking through the trees, Frodo had come upon him suddenly, found fierce eyes under bushy brows fixed on him.

"Frodo Baggins," the man said, in a voice like a fire devouring forests. Such a voice shouldn't have come from one so bent, so bowed, and yet, unbroken.

Stricken, frightened, Frodo almost couldn't speak. But – "Yes," he said, spreading his feet to run or throw a stone, "that's my name."

"So it is," the man said, and now he sounded old, old as the gray of his clothes like far-off century-seeing mountains, so old and _tired_ that Frodo forgot his fear.

"Can I help you?" he found himself asking.

"Once I used to think -" The man stopped and shook his head, beard swaying. "Whatever I thought, that is past. The hour is too dark now for regrets. Farewell, Frodo Baggins."

"Wait!"

The man did, he waited, if only for a second, while Frodo watched him and tried to understand why he had called out. "I don't know your name," he said, finally, lamely.

"It matters not."

The man walked and walked, until the trees hid him from view.

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"_Do you ever wish you went? With the dwarves, I mean."_

"_Of course not, Frodo. My place is here."_

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One morning they wake and do not know it for morning: the sky is smoke and fire.

"The black shadow," Frodo says to himself.

"What is it, Mr. Frodo? What _is_ it?" Sam asks, staring at him with widened eyes.

"I don't know, Sam." He thinks of silver like a dead man's armor, like eleven tears, thinks of sickened grapes, black and bitter. Sam takes his arm, and they go inside together.

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When the Shadow comes, Buckland fights with stones and pitchforks, with frying pans and wooden oars; they fall. Merry never abandons the gate. The Tooks burrow deep, but fire is sent after them, fell fire that burns even under the earth. They say Pippin brought down a beast nine times his size with his favorite bread knife. They say of him, because he is no longer there to speak words for himself.

In Hobbiton they lock their doors and wait.

When the Shadow comes, Frodo holds Sam close – he looks the thing in the eye and_ doesn't flinch_.

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"_Do you ever wish you went?"_

"Sometimes_, Frodo. Sometimes, I do."_

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– the end.


End file.
